Find me in the River (4/10)
Title: Find me in the River
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Fandom: CSI
Characters: Nick/Greg, the workforce of the Las Vegas Crime Lab night shift, some of the Stokes family
Length: ~32,000 (Chapter One: 3,536)
Spoilers: 2.03 - Overload
Summary: For Nick and Greg to get it together, Nick has to acknowledge some things about himself that he's been hiding for years. When he starts to come out to colleagues and family, a number of lives are affected.
Warnings: Child abuse. Domestic violence. Homophobic violence. Contains details of a number of crime scenes.
Walking against the water
Nick hadn’t expected Greg to come and pick him up from the airport, but he felt a bolt of pleasure go through him when he saw Greg’s slim frame leaning against a pillar in arrivals at McCarran. As Greg wrapped his arms around him and Nick breathed in his familiar scent, he felt like he’d come home.
“How did it go?” Greg asked, once they’d loaded Nick’s bag into the Jetta. “How are they?”
“Really excited,” Nick grinned. “Annie’s so proud of her bump - and boy does she have one now she’s seven months along. She kept patting it with a sappy look on her face when she thought I wasn’t looking.”
Greg laughed. “And David?”
“I’ve never seen a man more delighted at the thought of being a father. Annie, being a superstitious Texan, won’t buy a stick of baby furniture until the baby is actually here, but David is working on a crib out in his garage.”
“Is it nice?”
“It’s the most badly constructed crib I’ve ever seen. The guy definitely chose well when he decided to be a research chemist rather than a carpenter. I tried to help him a little, but I think I’m going to have to tell Annie to ‘accidentally’ spill solvents on it or something, before it ends up killing my niece or nephew.”
Nick smiled at the memory of David excitedly showing him the crib; oblivious to the badly pounded in nails and sharp edges.
“And your parents?”
The smile faded from Nick’s face. “We made it up to the ranch.”
Greg gave him a fleeting look of concern. “Didn’t go well?”
Nick swallowed. “I still hadn’t decided what to do, you know? Annie and I had been talking for a couple of days about whether I should tell them; just going round and round.”
Greg knew. They had been talking about it for a week before Nick flew off to Houston to visit his sister. Whether Nick could bear to lose his parents for good if they took it badly. Whether he could bear to keep something so important about his life from his family.
He looked at Greg’s profile, watched Greg watching the road as they deftly wove in an out of the traffic coming out of McCarron.
“We had barbecue for lunch the day we were at the ranch and Cisco and I had gone to get more charcoal from the outside store. When we were coming back with it we could see Momma fussing over Annie and trying to get her to sit more in the shade. He hissed at me, Greg, there’s no other word for it; ‘I don’t want your Momma to know that isn’t ever going to happen for you.’ “
Nick shivered, despite the heat. “I said, ‘Pardon me, sir?’ and he just gave me this awful look and said ‘You know what I’m saying, boy. I won’t have it in my house. Do you understand me?’ and I nodded and that was that.”
“Shit, I’m so sorry, Nicky.”
“Yeah. I hadn’t expected that. I thought that maybe I wouldn’t tell them, or I would and there would be some kind of scene. I didn’t expect to be cut off at the pass and told I’m disgusting.”
The muscle in Greg’s jaw jumped. “You know there’s not a disgusting thing about you, right?”
“Yeah.” Nick blew out a breath. “I just look at Annie and David all excited about their child and I wonder how that love that Cisco must have felt, went away. He looked at me like he hated me, Greg.”
Greg took one hand off the steering wheel and wrapped it around Nick’s.
Nick dropped his bag on the floor and sat down on his sofa with a groan. “Man, that feels good.”
“Because you’ve not done enough sitting today? Did they make you stand up on the airplane?”
Nick flipped Greg the bird without opening his eyes. “Want a beer?”
Greg looked at his watch. “I should get back to my apartment and get ready for work. You’re going out with Robert tonight, yes?”
Nick groaned. “You’re right. God, I was clearly out of my mind when I agreed to that; I’m so not in the mood for second date banter.”
“Says the guy with four other second dates behind him.”
“Hey, I’ve been on more than nine dates.”
Greg raised his eyebrow. “I’m not counting grinding with some anonymous guy on the dance floor as a date, Casanova.”
Nick sighed with frustration. “This whole thing is stupid anyway.”
Greg smiled. “You were right that day in the diner. You need to see what’s out there.”
“By going on dates with random people? This is the last time I take advice from you that you’ve based on watching sit-com reruns.”
“What?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Sanders. I know about your little Sports Night addiction. I saw the episode where Dana tries to make Casey date other people before she’ll go out with him.”
Greg grinned as he moved towards the front door of Nick’s apartment. “Stokes, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” His face softened as he reached for the doorhandle. “Be safe, won’t you?”
Nick smiled.
Standing outside Nick’s apartment with his back to the wall, Greg felt like the stupidest man alive. He wanted Nick so much that he ached and he regretted the moment four months ago when he had suggested that Nick should date other people. Being friends with someone while they decided if they wanted to be with you had sounded stupidly self-sacrificing when he’d thought of it, but the reality was so much worse. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
They were short-handed at the start of shift with Nick on a day off and Warrick preparing for a court date, so Greg had been dispatched with Sara to a frat-house gang rape up at UNLV. Greg half-suspected he had been sent along to babysit Sara, and not for the field experience. He had no great insight into Grissom and Sara’s relationship but it was clear that Grissom hadn’t noticed that therapy was starting to take off some of Sara’s edges.
“We can’t split up, so shall we start at the scene and then we’ll take whatever we’ve got back to the lab when the SAE kit is ready?” Sara was looking at him expectantly. She’d parked her Denali outside the fraternity house; next to the LVPD patrol car with its flashers on.
“Sure thing, but won’t the SAE kit be finished soon?”
Sara shook her head. “They’ve probably only just started, so it won’t be ready for hours yet.”
“Hours?”
Sara knit her brows. “Yeah, it takes about five hours to do an SAE kit. Have you not covered them in your field training?”
“Nope. Nevada trained male CSIs don’t learn how to do SAE kits anymore, because we have SANE nurses in this state and most vics prefer a woman.”
Sara’s mouth flickered up in one corner. “Interesting.”
Greg opened his mouth to say something else, but she was already jumping out of the Denali down to the ground.
The room that the rape had taken place in was down in the basement of the frat house. The place was a mess; covered in beer bottles and ashtrays that had both cigarette and joint ends in them. The smell of stale bongwater hung in the air.
Sara put her kit down. “We’re basically looking for fingerprints and fluids to try and sort out who was where and doing what. I imagine the defence will be consent, so anything we find that undermines that would be useful also.”
Greg nodded, eyes taking in the scene.
The bar Robert had taken them to was nice, Nick reflected. A bit too nice. It said relationship and commitment rather than flirting and fling. Robert was a decent guy; a corporate lawyer whose mother was heavily involved in PFLAG, but all that mattered to Nick was that he wasn’t Greg.
The start of the evening hadn’t been a complete disaster. He and Robert had made polite, if desultory, conversation and Nick had learned more than ever wanted to know about anti-trust litigation and the difficulty of finding a decent golf caddy. And Robert was incredibly hot, with a face that looked like it belonged in Hollywood, rather than a lawyer’s office.
He wasn’t Greg though and eventually, out of a desire to see the evening - with its steaks and snifters of brandy - come to an end, Nick crossed a line.
It had seemed like nothing when he was sitting in the back of the cab on his way back to Robert’s five-bed, three-and-a-half-bath McMansion. It still seemed like nothing when they were kissing hard up against Robert’s wine fridge with Robert’s fingers twined through his hair. But, suddenly, it seemed like something when Nick was on his knees on Robert’s kitchen floor with Robert in his mouth. It felt like a punch in the gut and Nick couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid as to have assumed that this would be ok.
Robert had barely finished when Nick zipped up his trousers and thanked him for a lovely evening, leaving Robert looking confused and disappointed even as the flush faded from his chest and his breathing slowed.
Not even waiting for a cab, Nick started to walk back towards the Strip. He was shaking, but not enough to stop him from pulling out his phone and texting Greg. Can you come over after shift?
It had taken Greg hours to isolate all six donors from the SAE kit. Day shift would have the task of comparing the donors’ DNA to the samples that he and Sara had taken from the basement of the frat house. They would also run the samples swabbed from the snaking queue of unapologetic fraternity brothers who were well drilled in this most unlovely of rituals. This was the third rape that had been reported at this frat house in five years.
Greg had worked long past the end of his shift and was surprised that Nick was still awake when he let himself in to Nick’s apartment. Nick was sitting on the sofa, in the dark, watching The Wedding Banquet.
“Hey,” Greg smiled. “I wasn’t sure if you’d still be up. Everything ok?”
“Sure,” Nick clicked off the TV and untangled himself from the blanket he had been sitting under. “Good shift?”
“Not bad,” Greg said. “I got to go out in the field. Gang rape at UNLV with a very zen Sara.”
“Nice,” Nick smiled. “Well, not nice exactly. It’s good that you’re getting more field experience.”
“Yeah. So,” Greg hesitated. “You texted. Did everything go ok with Robert?”
Nick’s smile faltered. “It went fine. But I don’t want to talk about Robert.”
“What then?” Greg was starting to get an uneasy feeling. There was a strange tension in the room.
Nick took Greg’s hand and pulled him into the kitchen. He got them both a beer out of the fridge, popped the caps and leaned back against the counter. Nick’s kitchen was small enough that Greg could smell Nick; mouthwash and soap and the faintest trace of an unidentifiable liquor.
“I’m calling time on this experiment of yours. I don’t want to see any other people.” Nick paused. “I just want to see you.”
“Nicky -“
“No, fuck the experiment. I’m in love with you, Greg. And dating every gay man west of the Mississippi is just going to waste time that I could spend with you.” Nick grinned. “Are you telling me you’re no longer on the market? That you and Wilkie are setting up home together?”
Greg rolled his eyes. “Of course not.”
And then Nick leaned forward and kissed him.
Greg had, in the hundreds of hours he had spent thinking about this, worried that this might be a difficult hurdle to get over. That going from touching like friends to touching like something else completely, would be hard.
Actually, having Nick’s tongue in his mouth felt like the most right thing in the whole world; having the heat of Nick’s body pressed up against him made shivers of desire go up and down his spine. Greg groaned against Nick’s mouth and slid his hand down Nick’s chest and over the muscled plain of his stomach toward the waistband of his sweats. Nick grabbed his wrist and, backing Greg into the wall, pushed both his hands above his head so he was stretched out along the wall like a man on a rack.
Greg was harder than he could ever remember being from a minute of making out and, arching his back, he angled his pelvis towards Nick. He met nothing but space. He wriggled harder. Nick was holding him against the wall; mouth still on Greg’s but with a foot of clean air between the parts of their bodies Greg wanted to be touching.
“Nicky,” Greg broke his mouth away. ”Do you want to take this into the bedroom?”
“Hmm?” Nick’s mouth was hot on his neck.
“Should we go to bed?”
And then Nick had let go of Greg’s wrists and stepped away from him with a look on his face that Greg couldn’t read. “I’m pretty tired, Greggo. Could we just go to sleep?”
Greg hoped he had succeeded in keeping the look of shock off his face. “Sure, Nick. Whatever you want.”
“Do you want a shower?”
Greg nodded, confused.
Nick vanished into his bedroom and came back with some blue cotton pyjama bottoms and a white t-shirt and gave them to Greg.
“There are clean towels in the bathroom and a spare toothbrush in the cabinet. I’ll see you in bed?” Nick didn’t meet Greg’s eyes with his own.
As Greg stood in Nick’s shower under the hot spray he realised, with a sensation close to panic, that he had cosmically misjudged where the hurdle might be in their physical relationship.
Greg towelled himself off and put on the pyjamas that Nick had given him with a sinking heart. Pyjama pants and a t-shirt were more than he had worn to bed since he was eleven and he’d never been given such extensive sleepwear by any other boyfriend, date or casual bed acquaintance. He fought down the desire to phone James Wilkes for a quick consult on gay pyjama etiquette; to try to work out what all of this meant.
Nick was sitting up in bed when Greg went through to his bedroom. Suddenly unsure, Greg gestured to the side that Nick wasn’t occupying. “May I?”
Nick raised his eyebrows. “Of course, man.”
Sliding under the crisp covers, Greg was painfully aware that this moment, which had imagined over and over again, was not going to plan. Nick was leaning against the headboard of his bed, with his knees forming points under the duvet. The tension that Greg had felt in the sitting room had followed them into Nick’s bedroom and was written in the line of Nick’s arms and in the careful blankness of his face.
He bunched up the pillows on his side of the bed, so he could lean against the headboard too.
“Are you ok, Nicky?”
( Chapter five: Blessings in the Valley)
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Fandom: CSI
Characters: Nick/Greg, the workforce of the Las Vegas Crime Lab night shift, some of the Stokes family
Length: ~32,000 (Chapter One: 3,536)
Spoilers: 2.03 - Overload
Summary: For Nick and Greg to get it together, Nick has to acknowledge some things about himself that he's been hiding for years. When he starts to come out to colleagues and family, a number of lives are affected.
Warnings: Child abuse. Domestic violence. Homophobic violence. Contains details of a number of crime scenes.
Walking against the water
Nick hadn’t expected Greg to come and pick him up from the airport, but he felt a bolt of pleasure go through him when he saw Greg’s slim frame leaning against a pillar in arrivals at McCarran. As Greg wrapped his arms around him and Nick breathed in his familiar scent, he felt like he’d come home.
“How did it go?” Greg asked, once they’d loaded Nick’s bag into the Jetta. “How are they?”
“Really excited,” Nick grinned. “Annie’s so proud of her bump - and boy does she have one now she’s seven months along. She kept patting it with a sappy look on her face when she thought I wasn’t looking.”
Greg laughed. “And David?”
“I’ve never seen a man more delighted at the thought of being a father. Annie, being a superstitious Texan, won’t buy a stick of baby furniture until the baby is actually here, but David is working on a crib out in his garage.”
“Is it nice?”
“It’s the most badly constructed crib I’ve ever seen. The guy definitely chose well when he decided to be a research chemist rather than a carpenter. I tried to help him a little, but I think I’m going to have to tell Annie to ‘accidentally’ spill solvents on it or something, before it ends up killing my niece or nephew.”
Nick smiled at the memory of David excitedly showing him the crib; oblivious to the badly pounded in nails and sharp edges.
“And your parents?”
The smile faded from Nick’s face. “We made it up to the ranch.”
Greg gave him a fleeting look of concern. “Didn’t go well?”
Nick swallowed. “I still hadn’t decided what to do, you know? Annie and I had been talking for a couple of days about whether I should tell them; just going round and round.”
Greg knew. They had been talking about it for a week before Nick flew off to Houston to visit his sister. Whether Nick could bear to lose his parents for good if they took it badly. Whether he could bear to keep something so important about his life from his family.
He looked at Greg’s profile, watched Greg watching the road as they deftly wove in an out of the traffic coming out of McCarron.
“We had barbecue for lunch the day we were at the ranch and Cisco and I had gone to get more charcoal from the outside store. When we were coming back with it we could see Momma fussing over Annie and trying to get her to sit more in the shade. He hissed at me, Greg, there’s no other word for it; ‘I don’t want your Momma to know that isn’t ever going to happen for you.’ “
Nick shivered, despite the heat. “I said, ‘Pardon me, sir?’ and he just gave me this awful look and said ‘You know what I’m saying, boy. I won’t have it in my house. Do you understand me?’ and I nodded and that was that.”
“Shit, I’m so sorry, Nicky.”
“Yeah. I hadn’t expected that. I thought that maybe I wouldn’t tell them, or I would and there would be some kind of scene. I didn’t expect to be cut off at the pass and told I’m disgusting.”
The muscle in Greg’s jaw jumped. “You know there’s not a disgusting thing about you, right?”
“Yeah.” Nick blew out a breath. “I just look at Annie and David all excited about their child and I wonder how that love that Cisco must have felt, went away. He looked at me like he hated me, Greg.”
Greg took one hand off the steering wheel and wrapped it around Nick’s.
Nick dropped his bag on the floor and sat down on his sofa with a groan. “Man, that feels good.”
“Because you’ve not done enough sitting today? Did they make you stand up on the airplane?”
Nick flipped Greg the bird without opening his eyes. “Want a beer?”
Greg looked at his watch. “I should get back to my apartment and get ready for work. You’re going out with Robert tonight, yes?”
Nick groaned. “You’re right. God, I was clearly out of my mind when I agreed to that; I’m so not in the mood for second date banter.”
“Says the guy with four other second dates behind him.”
“Hey, I’ve been on more than nine dates.”
Greg raised his eyebrow. “I’m not counting grinding with some anonymous guy on the dance floor as a date, Casanova.”
Nick sighed with frustration. “This whole thing is stupid anyway.”
Greg smiled. “You were right that day in the diner. You need to see what’s out there.”
“By going on dates with random people? This is the last time I take advice from you that you’ve based on watching sit-com reruns.”
“What?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Sanders. I know about your little Sports Night addiction. I saw the episode where Dana tries to make Casey date other people before she’ll go out with him.”
Greg grinned as he moved towards the front door of Nick’s apartment. “Stokes, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” His face softened as he reached for the doorhandle. “Be safe, won’t you?”
Nick smiled.
Standing outside Nick’s apartment with his back to the wall, Greg felt like the stupidest man alive. He wanted Nick so much that he ached and he regretted the moment four months ago when he had suggested that Nick should date other people. Being friends with someone while they decided if they wanted to be with you had sounded stupidly self-sacrificing when he’d thought of it, but the reality was so much worse. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
They were short-handed at the start of shift with Nick on a day off and Warrick preparing for a court date, so Greg had been dispatched with Sara to a frat-house gang rape up at UNLV. Greg half-suspected he had been sent along to babysit Sara, and not for the field experience. He had no great insight into Grissom and Sara’s relationship but it was clear that Grissom hadn’t noticed that therapy was starting to take off some of Sara’s edges.
“We can’t split up, so shall we start at the scene and then we’ll take whatever we’ve got back to the lab when the SAE kit is ready?” Sara was looking at him expectantly. She’d parked her Denali outside the fraternity house; next to the LVPD patrol car with its flashers on.
“Sure thing, but won’t the SAE kit be finished soon?”
Sara shook her head. “They’ve probably only just started, so it won’t be ready for hours yet.”
“Hours?”
Sara knit her brows. “Yeah, it takes about five hours to do an SAE kit. Have you not covered them in your field training?”
“Nope. Nevada trained male CSIs don’t learn how to do SAE kits anymore, because we have SANE nurses in this state and most vics prefer a woman.”
Sara’s mouth flickered up in one corner. “Interesting.”
Greg opened his mouth to say something else, but she was already jumping out of the Denali down to the ground.
The room that the rape had taken place in was down in the basement of the frat house. The place was a mess; covered in beer bottles and ashtrays that had both cigarette and joint ends in them. The smell of stale bongwater hung in the air.
Sara put her kit down. “We’re basically looking for fingerprints and fluids to try and sort out who was where and doing what. I imagine the defence will be consent, so anything we find that undermines that would be useful also.”
Greg nodded, eyes taking in the scene.
The bar Robert had taken them to was nice, Nick reflected. A bit too nice. It said relationship and commitment rather than flirting and fling. Robert was a decent guy; a corporate lawyer whose mother was heavily involved in PFLAG, but all that mattered to Nick was that he wasn’t Greg.
The start of the evening hadn’t been a complete disaster. He and Robert had made polite, if desultory, conversation and Nick had learned more than ever wanted to know about anti-trust litigation and the difficulty of finding a decent golf caddy. And Robert was incredibly hot, with a face that looked like it belonged in Hollywood, rather than a lawyer’s office.
He wasn’t Greg though and eventually, out of a desire to see the evening - with its steaks and snifters of brandy - come to an end, Nick crossed a line.
It had seemed like nothing when he was sitting in the back of the cab on his way back to Robert’s five-bed, three-and-a-half-bath McMansion. It still seemed like nothing when they were kissing hard up against Robert’s wine fridge with Robert’s fingers twined through his hair. But, suddenly, it seemed like something when Nick was on his knees on Robert’s kitchen floor with Robert in his mouth. It felt like a punch in the gut and Nick couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid as to have assumed that this would be ok.
Robert had barely finished when Nick zipped up his trousers and thanked him for a lovely evening, leaving Robert looking confused and disappointed even as the flush faded from his chest and his breathing slowed.
Not even waiting for a cab, Nick started to walk back towards the Strip. He was shaking, but not enough to stop him from pulling out his phone and texting Greg. Can you come over after shift?
It had taken Greg hours to isolate all six donors from the SAE kit. Day shift would have the task of comparing the donors’ DNA to the samples that he and Sara had taken from the basement of the frat house. They would also run the samples swabbed from the snaking queue of unapologetic fraternity brothers who were well drilled in this most unlovely of rituals. This was the third rape that had been reported at this frat house in five years.
Greg had worked long past the end of his shift and was surprised that Nick was still awake when he let himself in to Nick’s apartment. Nick was sitting on the sofa, in the dark, watching The Wedding Banquet.
“Hey,” Greg smiled. “I wasn’t sure if you’d still be up. Everything ok?”
“Sure,” Nick clicked off the TV and untangled himself from the blanket he had been sitting under. “Good shift?”
“Not bad,” Greg said. “I got to go out in the field. Gang rape at UNLV with a very zen Sara.”
“Nice,” Nick smiled. “Well, not nice exactly. It’s good that you’re getting more field experience.”
“Yeah. So,” Greg hesitated. “You texted. Did everything go ok with Robert?”
Nick’s smile faltered. “It went fine. But I don’t want to talk about Robert.”
“What then?” Greg was starting to get an uneasy feeling. There was a strange tension in the room.
Nick took Greg’s hand and pulled him into the kitchen. He got them both a beer out of the fridge, popped the caps and leaned back against the counter. Nick’s kitchen was small enough that Greg could smell Nick; mouthwash and soap and the faintest trace of an unidentifiable liquor.
“I’m calling time on this experiment of yours. I don’t want to see any other people.” Nick paused. “I just want to see you.”
“Nicky -“
“No, fuck the experiment. I’m in love with you, Greg. And dating every gay man west of the Mississippi is just going to waste time that I could spend with you.” Nick grinned. “Are you telling me you’re no longer on the market? That you and Wilkie are setting up home together?”
Greg rolled his eyes. “Of course not.”
And then Nick leaned forward and kissed him.
Greg had, in the hundreds of hours he had spent thinking about this, worried that this might be a difficult hurdle to get over. That going from touching like friends to touching like something else completely, would be hard.
Actually, having Nick’s tongue in his mouth felt like the most right thing in the whole world; having the heat of Nick’s body pressed up against him made shivers of desire go up and down his spine. Greg groaned against Nick’s mouth and slid his hand down Nick’s chest and over the muscled plain of his stomach toward the waistband of his sweats. Nick grabbed his wrist and, backing Greg into the wall, pushed both his hands above his head so he was stretched out along the wall like a man on a rack.
Greg was harder than he could ever remember being from a minute of making out and, arching his back, he angled his pelvis towards Nick. He met nothing but space. He wriggled harder. Nick was holding him against the wall; mouth still on Greg’s but with a foot of clean air between the parts of their bodies Greg wanted to be touching.
“Nicky,” Greg broke his mouth away. ”Do you want to take this into the bedroom?”
“Hmm?” Nick’s mouth was hot on his neck.
“Should we go to bed?”
And then Nick had let go of Greg’s wrists and stepped away from him with a look on his face that Greg couldn’t read. “I’m pretty tired, Greggo. Could we just go to sleep?”
Greg hoped he had succeeded in keeping the look of shock off his face. “Sure, Nick. Whatever you want.”
“Do you want a shower?”
Greg nodded, confused.
Nick vanished into his bedroom and came back with some blue cotton pyjama bottoms and a white t-shirt and gave them to Greg.
“There are clean towels in the bathroom and a spare toothbrush in the cabinet. I’ll see you in bed?” Nick didn’t meet Greg’s eyes with his own.
As Greg stood in Nick’s shower under the hot spray he realised, with a sensation close to panic, that he had cosmically misjudged where the hurdle might be in their physical relationship.
Greg towelled himself off and put on the pyjamas that Nick had given him with a sinking heart. Pyjama pants and a t-shirt were more than he had worn to bed since he was eleven and he’d never been given such extensive sleepwear by any other boyfriend, date or casual bed acquaintance. He fought down the desire to phone James Wilkes for a quick consult on gay pyjama etiquette; to try to work out what all of this meant.
Nick was sitting up in bed when Greg went through to his bedroom. Suddenly unsure, Greg gestured to the side that Nick wasn’t occupying. “May I?”
Nick raised his eyebrows. “Of course, man.”
Sliding under the crisp covers, Greg was painfully aware that this moment, which had imagined over and over again, was not going to plan. Nick was leaning against the headboard of his bed, with his knees forming points under the duvet. The tension that Greg had felt in the sitting room had followed them into Nick’s bedroom and was written in the line of Nick’s arms and in the careful blankness of his face.
He bunched up the pillows on his side of the bed, so he could lean against the headboard too.
“Are you ok, Nicky?”
( Chapter five: Blessings in the Valley)